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Go back now and actually read the previous posts, because it's about the design of the desktop and not about windows management. Like L33F3R said before; get your head out of it...

What?! Clear-looks is a copy of Windows XP stylo buttons with Microsoft Office 2003 bars. No! IT is copied.

I thought we were talking about Aero, which is the default.. Clearlooks looks like the XP or the "classic theme" from windows, and I love the latter. As for XP theme - not to bad, but overly large window decorations for my taste.

KDE4 just Mac OS X round style buttons copied, with some ugly gray sprayed over it, just because they can.

Please... buy some glasses...

Hold on a sec, are we talking about design or just bashing on poor choice of colors? I guess you could put that under "design" (and infuriate people who actually design the interface, in terms of behaviour, placement, dimensions, etc..), the ease of customization of KDE/Gnome makes the default theme/colors a moot point as far as I'm concerned.
Plastik (the theme I use in KDE4, very similar to Clearlooks/Windows "classic" and XP themes): (by default) three buttons (minimize, maximize and close, which highlight/glow red on mouse-over, in the top-right corner of the window, customizable button placement;
Aero: same as above, minus the customizable buttons, plus close button slightly wider, blurred translucent decoration and small details that are necessary as a result (window title text outlining)
I ask again: what's the great design difference I should be seeing here (apart from the translucency, which I'm getting to below)?

You just said that you thought it was superior! You're nothing but a fanboy.

Up there I was talking about window management, not the default theme/colors. Edit: Come to think of it where did I claim that either was superior?? All I said was that I don't find Aero as superior and Clearlooks/Plastik/XP/classic are roughly equal (even you just said they are a copy; go figure).

Once again; what does this have to do with the Windows 7 look? PS: Windows 7 does have stable drivers...

Uhh, I'm referring to linux here ^_^' (yes, I actually said that linux graphics drivers suck - which is why I can't have the translucent blurred window decorations, the main difference from Windows) Windows drivers aren't exactly perfect but at least one can update/downgrade them easily at will and all the hardware features are actually supported.

And your window also has a firefox sticker on it with an 'X' on it too? Puh-lease...

What I was saying is that the default theme looks nothing like a "real" window - you just gave a reason why it's not even worth trying - so what exactly was the following quote supposed to mean?>

And the Window decoration is not just transparent, because that way you'd be annoyed by the content underneath it, but blurred to make it even more look like a Window.

While we're at bad analogies, real windows have shades. Windows doesn't do window shading and while KDE/Gnome do, it's not really analogous to real-world shades.

I said Idon't find them useful but this apparently not a common opinion. And since I don't use them that much, I can't compare the quality of implementation/integration of Windows/KDE/Gnome.

Edit: I should've added this in the first post but just to be clear, this is all my opinion. I'm not a designer, I just voice what each interface feels like when I use it. I have yet to hear anyone bash the window decoration design of Gnome/KDE and favor Windows. A lot of apps do suck and integrate poorly but decorations are on-par, and management features are superior to that of WIndows. They're certainly not the reason I'd switch to windows (and there are plenty of reasons I'd do that).

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I do wonder what exactly is genius about the placement of the close/maximise/minimise buttons. Is it that they're sitting flush with the top of the window border? Wow, inspired...

The transparency and blur is nice, but I think a little overdone. The blur in particular looks very awkward. The transparency is fine, except that the window contents are entirely opaque. They don't gel well. However, they do get points for being able to do it: anyone remember the Murrine work to get Vista-style transparencies to Linux? Anyone using it?

Also, congratulations Windows 7 on finally getting an innovative window management feature. I refer, of course, to being able to drag windows to the sides/top of the screen. About time.

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I do wonder what exactly is genius about the placement of the close/maximise/minimise buttons. Is it that they're sitting flush with the top of the window border? Wow, inspired...

It's the fact that you cannot do anything interesting with these buttons, yet it's very different from squares and circles. That in my opinion makes it genius because I thought no one could do anything else with these things.

The blur in particular looks very awkward. The transparency is fine, except that the window contents are entirely opaque.

It's blurred as if everything behind it is out of focus. Like depth of field.

Also, congratulations Windows 7 on finally getting an innovative window management feature. I refer, of course, to being able to drag windows to the sides/top of the screen. About time.

That is not even something that I would realy care about msyelf. However the fact how the 'program-in-window' functions are integrated are awesome. For example IE8 is an icon on a button on the taskbar, right? But when you download something the button starts functioning as a progress bar and thereby showing the user some valuable information.

All these touches are awesome. But I prefer KDE4 on Linux with a magnitude of ten more

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There are (lots of) things I'll praise Windows for (ABI compatibility making portable apps possible; allowing the user to install apps into whatever directory they feel like; auto-inflating swapfiles; power management; wifi management that doesn't break in every other version, simplistic GUI-driven utils for the one time you need something simple; dead-simple filesharing; after-the-fact compressed folders; on-line defragmenting...). But window management is one of those things "so exceedingly simplistic that only a caveman would want to use them."

I know those are your opinions, but I don't see a single problem in making portable apps on Linux - there are such apps, you can install packages to directories you like to (and thanks, but I hate windows way of installing - I prefer repos), auto inflating swap file... but Windoze had idiotic way (or still has) in using swap file, power management and wifi management as far as I remember never broke for me (except madwifi drivers, but it's another story), can you point what broke for you? About those simplistic GUI-driven utils I don't know what are you talking about, on-line defragmentation afaik Ext4 supports it.

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I know those are your opinions, but I don't see a single problem in making portable apps on Linux - there are such apps,

Really? Where are they? Or am I expexted to do it myself from the tarball version?

you can install packages to directories you like to

How do I do that? I consider the fact this is not immediately obvious as another problem.

(and thanks, but I hate windows way of installing - I prefer repos),

I prefer repos too, it's the package manager utility (I use aptitude) which could use more user input. I agree that repos are the way to go, definitely easier to deal with.

auto inflating swap file... but Windoze had idiotic way (or still has) in using swap file,

Idiotic in what way? I definitely prefer swap files over partitions (that the Ubuntu installer insists on a partition is mind-boggling at this point) and given a choice between self-inflating swap files and having the system slow down to a screeching halt when there's not enough virtual memory, I'll take the former, thankyou

power management and wifi management as far as I remember never broke for me (except madwifi drivers, but it's another story), can you point what broke for you?

Good for you, I'm using Kubuntu and the network manager widget in 9.04 was unusable for WPA-enterprise (didn't even try to connect). 9.10 uses knetworkmanager which pretty much just works, but something down the stack (WPA supplicant or the driver) causes AP-scans to randomly fail and NM sees no networks. If this is with the (best-supported?) intel3945, I can't imagine what the owners of broadcom must be going through. More omportantly though, I'm still waiting for GUI-driven ICS and preferably bridging/bonding, custom MAC etc. (nope, using /etc/network/interfaces doesn't work for me).

About those simplistic GUI-driven utils I don't know what are you talking about,

For example, the filezila FTP server - install, run and have a server with accounts in minutes. On linux, the are some ftp servers I could install, but they're all conf-file driven AFAIK and have no graphical console. Without reading the manual, I have no idea where to go from installing the software. Another example - solarwinds TFTP server: Run, select directory, click start, done. Ready to read/save random Cisco IOS image/configuration/etc in mere seconds, no manual. No such thing on linux AFAIK.

on-line defragmentation afaik Ext4 supports it.

It will support it at some point, I think it's still not implemented. This after what, 15-20 years since online defragmentation worked in DOS? My best shot at defragmenting files on Linux seems to be to buy another HD and copy over all the files one by one. EDIT: Oh, and don't forget this will do nothing to help defragment other filesystems, notably FAT.

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Really? Where are they? Or am I expexted to do it myself from the tarball version?

It depends what you mean. In example I can use tarballs, Debian packages, Ubuntu packages, Ubuntu packages from previous version and they work. Can I run win98 or xp binaries in win7 natively?

How do I do that? I consider the fact this is not immediately obvious as another problem.

Maybe this way: yum --installroot= but it probably depends on package config ( you can change it). However, if it's not what you expect it can be 'disadvantage' of not having something called registry, but I'm glad we don't have this thing.

Idiotic in what way? I definitely prefer swap files over partitions (that the Ubuntu installer insists on a partition is mind-boggling at this point) and given a choice between self-inflating swap files and having the system slow down to a screeching halt when there's not enough virtual memory, I'll take the former, thankyou

I have nothing against this and I would also prefer this way I meant idiotic, because Windows uses swap while there's still enough memory left and things slow down.

For example, the filezila FTP server - install, run and have a server with accounts in minutes. On linux, the are some ftp servers I could install, but they're all conf-file driven AFAIK and have no graphical console. Without reading the manual, I have no idea where to go from installing the software. Another example - solarwinds TFTP server: Run, select directory, click start, done. Ready to read/save random Cisco IOS image/configuration/etc in mere seconds, no manual. No such thing on linux AFAIK.

In this case it can be like you said.

Good for you, I'm using Kubuntu and the network manager widget in 9.04 was unusable for WPA-enterprise (didn't even try to connect). 9.10 uses knetworkmanager which pretty much just works, but something down the stack (WPA supplicant or the driver) causes AP-scans to randomly fail and NM sees no networks. If this is with the (best-supported?) intel3945, I can't imagine what the owners of broadcom must be going through. More omportantly though, I'm still waiting for GUI-driven ICS and preferably bridging/bonding, custom MAC etc. (nope, using /etc/network/interfaces doesn't work for me).

It's probably Kubuntu fault, there are known bugs in knetworkmanager (or in some other Kubuntu package) and it seems they won't fix them till next release...

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It depends what you mean. In example I can use tarballs, Debian packages, Ubuntu packages, Ubuntu packages from previous version and they work. Can I run win98 or xp binaries in win7 natively?

I think we've got a misunderstanding here - by portabble apps, I meant something like this - apps you extract to a random directory in which the app is fully contained - settings, temporary files, pretty much everything. This allows you to use a USB flash drive as the app root and run the app on any windows PC you connect it to.

With some tweaking, I believe one cat turn a tarball into a portable app, but the incompatibilities in some low-level libraries + binary incompatibilities between binaries created by different versions of gcc mean the stuff rarely works across multiple distros.